Griffin`s Gamble

Forbes Looks At Game-show Mogul`s Problems With Resorts International

Guests on ``Jeopardy`` and ``Wheel of Fortune`` may lose, but none has been taken to the cleaners like the shows` producer, Merv Griffin.

June 11 Forbes` ``How Merv Griffin Got Taken in Atlantic City`` is a refreshing reminder for the financially humble. Yes, riders of public transit, the rich can be given to great stupidity or naivete.

In 1988, the entertainer-turned-mogul used $325 million in junk bonds to best Donald Trump in bidding to control the stock of Resorts International, which owned hotel-casinos in Atlantic City and the Bahamas. Many thought it was a dumb deal, and they were correct: Resorts suspended interest payments in early 1989 and, in December, filed for bankruptcy.

The deal was a clunker because the 70-year-old Atlantic City casino Griffin bought would look ``seedy and decrepit in comparison`` with the Taj Mahal that Trump was building next door.

``How could a man who is smart enough to make $400 million be so dumb as to buy a losing proposition at an outrageous price?`` reporters Richard Stern and John Connolly ask rhetorically.

They suggest that Griffin, like Ronald Reagan, wasn`t big on details. He unwittingly entrusted his fortunes to slimeballs with mob ties. Preferring to sit in a Beverly Hills mansion and mull questions for game shows, he may not have known that the executive who handled his outside investments was tight with an organized-crime figure who then played a role in the deal.

Skimming cash off a casino`s take is passe. A more adroit crook schemes to make millions through overcharging a casino for items such as linen supplies and airline tours. Such may have been the mob`s interest in Griffin. Moreover, that key Griffin executive, and assorted characters, stood to make millions instantly if a deal with Trump was cut. A Griffin lawyer would get $2 million right off the bat. Together, they ``were willing to let Griffin overpay,`` the authors say. The presumably savvier investment bankers who raised the junk bonds were excluded from the negotiations.

Griffin, who declined to comment to Forbes, may find solace in Trump`s own financial ills these days. Still, he ``must wish he had never heard of Resorts.``

The spring Dissent is devoted largely to essays on ``Revolution in Europe,`` and it shows (if unintentionally) how many left-leaning

intellectuals are straining to avoid declaring capitalism a victor over communism. Elsewhere, Washington Post political reporter Thomas Edsall is excellent on the Democratic Party`s travail in trying to appeal to corporate America. The party`s relationship to business trails only race as a policy conundrum, ``pitting elite reformers against a working- and lower-middle-class electorate hungry for material improvement.``

Ah, only in tranquil, ever-magnanimous academe: The spring-summer Ploughshares, a Boston literary quarterly, includes an introduction in which the editors go afield to zing Northwestern University`s Joseph Epstein, acerbic and brainy editor of American Scholar, and U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.``

While narrow-minded, backwards-staring hack scholars like Joseph Epstein have succeeded in instigating yet another of those periodical debates on the value of contemporary poetry, while extremists of the right like Jesse Helms, legitimized by blindered voters, try to subjugate the arts to `majority`

June Glamour has bittersweet confessions of women who chose to give up children to adoption, rather than have abortions, including a 21-year-old woman in St. Paul who wonders on Mother`s Day, ``Am I a mom or not?``. . . The plentiful paradoxes of Italy (49 governments since 1945 yet arguably stable politically; private thrift and public profligacy) are detailed in one of The Economist`s strong nation surveys, in the May 26 issue . . . The new novel

(``The Burden of Proof``) of Chicago attorney Scott Turow, a good fellow finishing first, makes him the 92nd writer to appear on Time`s cover.

July Exposure, an intensely hip, oversized, Los Angeles fashion-and-arts bimonthly, inspects our ``obsession`` with dead stars (``a relationship with no strings attached``), and also sneaks into the making of Oliver Stone`s movie on the late rocker Jim Morrison.

And there`s a letter from Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, miffed that an interview with him on censorship was ``surrounded by suggestive and obscene advertising.``